Authentic French Fashions of the Twenties

413 Costume Designs from "L'Art Et La Mode"

JoAnne Olian

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780486261874
• eBook ISBN: 9780486139067
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

In the 1920s, fashion magazines were the principal source for news of the latest Paris couture. One of the most famous and long-lived of these journals was L'Art et la Mode, published from 1880 to 1967. L'Art et la Mode captured the glamor that was Paris in the Twenties, from days at the races to nights at the opera, from Sundays at the Ritz to Saturdays at the Folies-Bergère, and it followed the glittering circuit that flourished from Longchamps to Deauville to Cannes to Biarritz. The magazine was read avidly not only by the rich who patronized the couture, but also by the woman who relied on her "little dressmaker" to copy the styles depicted in the periodical.
This lavishly illustrated volume offers 138 dazzling pages from L'Art et la Mode featuring fashions for all occasions by the great French couturiers of the Twenties—Patou, Worth, Molyneux, Doucet, Paquin, Vionnet, Lanvin, and Chanel among them. Selected by JoAnne Olian, curator of the famed Costume Collection at the Museum of the City of New York, a wealth of designs include stylish outfits for winter sports, hunting season, tennis, golf, and other athletic pursuits, as well as high-fashion ensembles for soirées and all manner of chic divertissements.
In addition to choosing the plates, Ms. Olian has also provided an excellent introduction discussing the magazine, the period, and its fashion trends. The result is a beautifully illustrated, sumptuous look back at one of haute couture's most influential decades. It is also an outstanding and inexpensive source of copyright-free fashion illustrations for use by designers and craftspeople.

INTRODUCTION

The glossy fashion magazines of today trace their origins to the costume books of the sixteenth century, when voyages of exploration and discovery created an avid curiosity about the constantly widening world. So popular was the subject that these books were published all over Europe, but principally in Venice and Germany. The first such volume appeared in 1562 in Paris. Unlike modern publications, these books did not predict fashion, but depicted foreign dress and described the customs and manners of both the Old and the New World.

In the second half of the seventeenth century the focus shifted to France, where Jean-Baptiste Colbert, finance minister of Louis XIV, determined to build a strong economy, and, cognizant of the national predilection for fashion and luxury, based one aspect of this ambitious program on the manufacture of French textiles, instituting steep protective tariffs, prohibiting the wearing of foreign silks and establishing over 100 factories under crown patronage. The results of these measures were strikingly evident at the palace of Versailles, the showcase of the Sun King.

Court fashions appeared in Le Mercure Galant, but it was not until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, in response to the insatiable contemporary demand for novelty, that Galerie des Modes initiated new styles fresh from the dressmakers. Published from 1778 to 1787, it depicted the mercurial fashions of a society so obsessed with style and change that Abigail Adams, in a letter from Paris, wrote, “To be out of fashion is more criminal than to be seen in a state of nature—to which the Parisians are not averse.”

In the nineteenth century, fashion periodicals, embraced by a growing middle class, proliferated rapidly. From 1840 to 1870 over 100 new magazines appeared in England, Germany and America as well as France. Adhering to a more or less uniform format, they covered social events, published new works of fiction and poetry, offered ideas for needlework projects and provided both color plates and black-and-white engravings of the latest fashions, which were invariably French.

The virtually simultaneous appearance on the fashion scene of Charles Frederick Worth and the Empress Eugénie assured permanent supremacy for French fashion. By her endorsement of Worth in the late 1850s, Eugénie was indirectly responsible for the creation of the haute-couture industry. Emperor Napoleon III, in the tradition of Louis XIV, limited the wearing of a gown at court to a single occasion, keeping mills and seamstresses busy producing a stream of novelties for a nouveau-riche society to wear to the palace of the Tuileries. As principal dressmaker to the glittering court of the Second Empire, Worth was responsible for the extravagant, hoop-skirted opulence of the Empress, who, by imperial command, dressed exclusi...

Table of contents

• DOVER BOOKS ON FASHION
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION